Introduction
For the last couple of days we have been talking about the globalization, the Church, and mission. In this our final day of the conference we want to look at the role of religious life and spirituality in our current global climate. The issue of globalization, as is abundantly clear, is so complex and far reaching that we often do not even know where to begin. As leaders of Religious Communities, you know the great extent to which Religious life also has been affected, positively and negatively, by these changes. Discerning the presence of the Spirit and committing ourselves to the demands of the gospel is the foremost challenge we face, and it is the reason why we are here for these days.
For the last couple of days we have been talking about the globalization, the Church, and mission. In this our final day of the conference we want to look at the role of religious life and spirituality in our current global climate. The issue of globalization, as is abundantly clear, is so complex and far reaching that we often do not even know where to begin. As leaders of Religious Communities, you know the great extent to which Religious life also has been affected, positively and negatively, by these changes. Discerning the presence of the Spirit and committing ourselves to the demands of the gospel is the foremost challenge we face, and it is the reason why we are here for these days.
As we look at this
challenge together, I’d like to recall a story that I heard a number of years ago. It is about a community of
people who lived on a dangerous sea coast where shipwrecks often occur. In this place there was once a crude little
life-saving station. The building was just a hut, and there was only one boat, but the few devoted members kept a constant
watch over the sea, and with no thought for themselves went out day and night tirelessly searching for the lost. Many
lives were saved by this wonderful little station, so that it became famous. Some of those who were saved and various
others in the surrounding area wanted to become associated with the station and give of their time and money and effort
for the support of its work. New boats were bought and new crews were trained. The little life-saving station
grew.
Some of the members of the life-saving station were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea. They replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building. Now the life-saving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it beautifully and furnished it exquisitely because they used it as a sort of club. Fewer members were now interested in going to sea on life-saving missions, so they hired life-boat crews to do this work. The life-saving motif still prevailed in this club's decorations and there was a special room where the club initiations were held. About this time, a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet, and half-drowned people, some of whom looked like we did the day we arrived. They were dirty and sick and some of them had black skin and some had yellow skin. The beautiful new club was in chaos. So the property committee immediately had a shower built outside the club where victims of shipwreck could be cleaned up before coming inside.
At the next meeting, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club's life-saving activities as being unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club. Some members insisted upon life-saving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a life-saving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save the lives of all the various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own life-saving station down the coast. They did.
As the years went by, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. It evolved into a club, and yet another life-saving station was founded. History continued to repeat itself, and if you visit that sea coast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along that shore. Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the people drown! (1)
In many ways the central message of my talk is very simple: our mission today is the same as it has always been: To proclaim Jesus Christ as the revelation of the God of Life and to labor with him to build a civilization of love. We do this precisely by reaching out to any and all people who are shipwrecked because of war, oppression, poverty, greed, abuse, drugs, fear, racism, meaninglessness, materialism, and many other perennial problems. We live out this mission not only as social workers, but who consciously and deliberately seek to follow Jesus Christ through the power of the Spirit. Amdist the many changes in our world and religious life, I would like to reflect on the ways in which the deeper current of our lives—namely our spirituality—calls and empowers us to become human, holy and hope-filled messengers of a new creation. I will structure my remarks around three levels: 1) Reflections on Personal Experience. 2) Reflections on the process of Globalization, 3) Reflections on Religious Life in a Global Age.
From Corporate Culture to Religious Life: Reflections on Personal Experience
For the last number of years I have been asking what theology adds to the process of Globalization. I ask this question more specifically as a religious of the Congregation of Holy Cross and a Catholic priest. I thought about sharing some of the theological insights of what later became the book, “Globalization, Spirituality and Justice: Navigating the Path to Peace,” and I invite you to take a look it if you want to explore more about the connection between our contemporary experience and the Christian tradition. But the more I reflected on this specific meeting, the more I thought it might be more valuable to talk about what led me to religious life in the first place and why I considered that a life as a religious would provide a better alternative to a career in a multinational corporation, which we know is one of the central, animating forces of globalization.
I am now 43 years old, and I was born during the Second Vatican Council in 1964. Given my age I know many of you are more qualified and more experienced than I am to give this talk, but I offer these reflections in hopes they will stimulate your own. In the course of growing up, I did not go to Catholic school until I went to college, so most of what I knew about my faith came about through my family and the Church we attended. Because of the nature of my father’s work, we moved on average of every two or three years, which made it very difficult to identify where I actually came from. About the only thing that was constant in my life since then is change.
The Church I grew up in did not seem to offer more in the way of stability. The local parishes, seeking to implement the norms of Vatican II, changed things regularly. I never knew the pre-Vatican II Church; I only knew the Church that was going though changes. In the beginning we had altar rails but within a few years we were suddenly receiving communion in the hands. We started off talking about the Sacrament of Penance and speaking to a priest behind a dark wall and then began referring to the Sacrament of reconciliation and began sharing face to face. I began going to mass out of a sense of obligation but then contemporary retreat movements began to introduce me to a more personal relationship with Jesus. When I got to college we started talking about how a personal relationship with Jesus also had social consequences, so we began working in issues of social justice and outreach to the poor. This time of change marked much of my own personal development, but it was also something that I think the universal Church was undergoing at the same time.
While I was born Catholic I only had passing thoughts about the priesthood, they quickly faded the more I fell in love, dated and imagined myself on a track to marriage, family, and a career in business. At the time I did not have any formulation of a global economy, but I knew I wanted to become involved in an international career. Much of this flowed from my experience an exchange foreign student in Uruguay and Argentina, and later in Chile, Peru and Mexico, which opened up new cultures and new worlds to me. These multi-cultural experiences enabled me to become more aware of the common bonds we shared beyond any of the particular differences among us.
Before returning to Latin America, however, and following in a family tradition, I began working for American Telephone and Telegraph and later the Bell System. AT&T at the time was one of the foremost, multinational corporations, and it provided me and my family with a relatively comfortable livelihood. My own social location at the time gave me the impression that success flowed from having money, power, and possessions, and the business world seemed to provide the best opportunities to seek these out. What is striking to me as I look back at this time is how uncritically I appropriated the values of a business and consumerist culture, without having tested out their adequacy in my own life. This soul-searching came later.
In my first job with AT&T I began working in a division called, “Advanced, Mobile Phone Service.” For the most part the company was still “on paper” in that it proposed a new technology that provided cellular phone service. I began emptying garbage cans and sweeping floors as a high school student, and then through college worked my way up through engineering, marketing and public relations. These jobs brought me to New Jersey, New York and later Washington, DC, where the company had its first test market, and I was in charge of the company’s first database. By 1984 we were not quite sure that cellular was going to succeed, and I tried to increase our customer sales beyond the roughly 250 customers in our database.
This company later became Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems, then, after a serious of other mergers, became Verizon Wireless. Now it is one of the largest cellular companies in the United States with more than 60 million subscribers. As this technology grew and expanded, they were offering lucrative opportunities to anyone with background and experience, not only nationally but internationally. Tremendous investment was happening in cellular, and opportunities were opening everywhere. Even while still in college the company I was working for gave me my own apartment, my own car, a car phone (which was a big deal in those days), an expense account, fancy dinners, flights home every weekend, a limousine to take me there, and more money than I had ever made in my life. According to what the world expected of me, or so it seemed at the time, I was finally beginning to “make it.” So why then, as I began to ride the beginning of a wave of global prosperity (at least in that part of the United States where I lived), did I start thinking of religious life and the priesthood?
Religious life, in all its strengths and weakness, has always held out the vision and the hope of being more and not just having more. It has given me a way to understand that material development without a corresponding spiritual development leaves a person empty and unsatisfied. I sometimes look back at that time and wonder what it would have been like if I stayed in Cellular. But to be honest, not often. I don’t miss that world at all. The job I had couldn’t even begin to satisfy the deeper hungers within. What attracted me to religious life was a desire to grow spiritually, to be part of a global community, and to give myself to a mission with meaning. The more I grew in my spirituality, the more it led me to go out to work with orphans, homeless, immigrants and others who are marginalized. Working with these people has been much more of an adventure than anything I experienced in the business world because it taught me that real wealth is measured not in terms of profits and losses but in terms of people’s inner wealth, what they possess inside themselves, namely, the quality of people’s characters, the endowment of their souls, the quality of their relationships and the treasures within them.
Religious life gave me the opportunity to explore the terrain of the heart in a way that the global economy could not even begin to touch. Let me frame it this way: religious life for me is a matter of seeking after God’s heart, learning about my own heart, and giving it away in service to other people and addressing the deepest needs of their hearts. This is what it means to be a consecrated religious: to belong to the heart of God and to be integrated into the heart of Christ the way Christ is integrated into the Father. This kind of integration cannot help but be concerned with the levels of disintegration in society, one that brings to the forefront a mission of the Kingdom of God.
The global economy never gave me or taught me that there is a wealth beyond material prosperity. I am not sure where I learned it. But without religious priests, brothers, and sisters who help nurture, guide and sustain my vocation, I never would have discovered it. And I do not believe my story is unique. I am sure if we looked back and were able to talk to the people who helped us discover our vocations, we would learn that they too experienced a call within, which nurtured by others and later came grow and mature within the charism of a particular community.
I am in religious life now twenty-two years and I am ordained fifteen of them. I have never looked back at leaving that communication in business for this one in religious life. Yet as I continue to reflect more on the contribution of theology, spirituality and religious life to the modern world, I find myself reflecting not only on the personal aspects of spirituality but their social dimensions as well. One image, with multiple dimensions, continues to shape my reflection [PPT 1]: 1) that we are all on a common global ship, 2) that it is time of Titanic change, 3) that we are veering way off course as a human community 4) that we are at a critical point in history, and 5) that when we can either shipwreck on the icebergs of greed or find a promised land of human solidarity. I believe it is within this arena that our spirituality and our mission takes shape, and I would like to reflect more for a moment on this process of globalization before discussing some element about religious life in the modern world.
From Isolation to Integration: Reflections on Globalization
Much has already been said about different aspects of globalization, and it is not my point to repeat them in detail [PPT 2]. But by way of summary, I would like to revisit some of this data as a way of clarifying our sense of what it means to journey together on this common global ship. One of the things globalization has made us increasingly aware of is that we are part of an inter- connected world, that we are linked together like never before. We are understanding this not only in terms of commercial markets, but we are also coming to understand this interconnection ecologically, anthropologically, even spiritually. The paradox of our contemporary reality however--if not contradiction--is that, while globalization is about becoming an integrated reality as never before, we are divided in ways never before seen in the history of humanity.
Robert Schreiter, who is the first and foremost theologian to take up this topic of globalization from a theological perspective, is one the editors of a special edition of Theological Studies on globalization, which just came out this week. In this issue I have one of the articles details some of the socio-economic data of our current global reality. Some of the most striking data I found in my research was that, although it is true that globalization has increased the standard of living for more than half the world, the gaps between the rich and the poor are growing, not shrinking.
The richest one percent of the world has as much as the poorest 57 percent taken together.(2) The difference in income between the richest and poorest countries was 3 to 1 in 1820, 11 to 1 in 1913, 35 to 1 in 1950, 44 to 1 in 1973, and 72 to 1 in 1992.(3) Current research indicates that the economic trends continue to diverge.(4) In 2008 more than 1000 people were billionaires, while a billion people survived on less than a dollar a day.(5) The figure below offers an economic snap-shot of the world: (6)
It is staggering to consider that, of the world’s 6.5 billion inhabitants, the three richest individuals have more assets than the combined GNP of the poorest 48 nations, a quarter of the world’s countries.(7) Also, of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 51 are corporations, 49 are countries. (8)
What has changed since I left corporate America is how dramatically the disparities have accelerated. The salaries of Chief Executive Officers is now as much as 411 times higher than that of the average worker, nearly ten times the 42-to-1 CEO-to-worker ratio in 1982.(9) By 2006, the CEOs of major corporations made annually, on average, $11.3 million. As these same corporations face financial pressures because of competition in the global economy, some CEOs and their corporate boards give themselves inordinate salaries and bonuses, some even after poor performance, laying off workers, and eliminating pension plans for many workers.(10)
The point here is not only to illustrate the extent we have lost our way, even in so short a period of time, but to highlight this disorder not only as a political, economic and social problem but a spiritual one. As Gaudium et Spes noted:
The truth is that the imbalances under which the modern world labors are linked with that more basic imbalance which is rooted in the heart of man... [where] many elements wrestle with one another. Thus, on the one hand, as a creature he experiences his limitations in a multitude of ways; on the other he feels himself to be boundless in his desires and summoned to a higher life. Pulled by manifold attractions he is constantly forced to choose among them and renounce some. Indeed, as a weak and sinful being, he often does what he would not, and fails to do what he would. Hence he suffers from internal divisions, and from these flow so many and such great discords in society (GS 10).
The issue, at root, is not that we have lost a sense of religion and become a secular society. We have simply just replaced One God for other gods and have moved principally from a monotheistic faith to a money-theistic faith. This new system has not helped us find a promised land of human solidarity but instead has really steered us off course and put us in grave danger of being ship wrecked, along with those we seek to help. In addition to the economic disparities, we know that we stand on the edge of running aground ecologically if we do not make a course correction. So what role to religious play in this process? We are certainly not the only group trying to deal with metanoia, but our role is critical.
My argument is that there are different levels of understanding globalization, and our current socio-economic setting is only dealing with one level of it, and I believe Religious life is significant in dealing with the others. I can illustrate best by a contemporary analogy, and it will allow me to extend the ship imagery even further [PPT 3]. If we look at the challenge of navigation in our contemporary context, we recognize that we have three different systems which can help us. Sonar helps map out the ocean depths, radar helps us identify obstacles on the ocean surface, and global positioning systems help us understand our location through satellite technology.
Like sonar, theology in general and religious life in particular offers us insight to the world beneath the ocean surface by probing the deeper terrain of human nature in all its capacities for virtue and sin. Like radar, they offers us a picture of the world in front of us by examining how we interact with others and our environment. Like a global positioning system, they offer us insight into transcendent realities by helping interpret the signals from above which can help us find our way from within our own social locations.
I believe the density of the conversation around globalization has to do with the horizontal dimensions of globalization, but religious life can help the world deal with its more vertical dimensions. While most of the world preoccupies itself with radar, part of our task is to help the world understand GPS and sonar as important instruments in that can help us as we seek to navigate our way through the complex realities of this time of change. Such a mission can be particularly helpful in a world trying to come to terms with the paradoxes of globalization. You may be familiar with a reflection called, “A Paradox of our times,” which is a interesting reflection on life in the modern world and which I quote in part:
The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways but narrower viewpoints. We spend more but have less. We buy more but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge but less judgment, more experts yet more problems, more medicine but less wellness….
We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've done larger things but not better things. We've cleaned up the air but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom but not our prejudice. We write more but learn less. We plan more but accomplish less. We've learned to rush but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less…It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom….(11)
Our lives as religious gives witness to the gospel message, which, as we know, offers another paradox, which is built on premises that differs substantially from our global economy: that we find ourselves by losing them, the greatest among us is the one who serves, that the one who was crucified has risen from the dead. Put another way, as we travel on this global ship, even as much changes on ocean surface, our job is to continue to understand human nature and divine revelation in order to offer witness to some of the enduring constants of what it means to be human before God. Even though we may have some differing interpretations of this task from culture to culture, there is at root more that we share in common than makes us different.
Reflection on Religious in an Age of Globalization
What then is the role of religious life in an age of globalization? As daunting as these changes may be, and as widespread, complex and revolutionary as these changes have been, in many ways the witness of religious life today is the same as it has been for previous generations. Though it is met with new challenges, the call is the same as it was for the industrial revolution, the enlightenment, the Renaissance, the middle Ages and the early days of the Church: It is to desire one thing: Jesus Christ and the Kingdom he proclaimed. Taking on the mind and heart of Christ is the one constant that will not change in our calling, even as everything else does. By saying this I do not mean to suggest that our job is simply to offer simple, pre-packaged, theological answers to a period marked by new “wineskins.” Globalization demands of us new competencies that are able to face new complexities, but at the core, our mission is still the same: to reach out to those who are shipwrecked in any way by war, poverty, division, addiction, fear, anxiety and many other social ills, to proclaim a God of Life and to build a civilization of love.
As we deal with these challenges I believe it is our task as religious to articulate some of the deeper currents of human life beyond this period of change and to examine them light of the gospel message. What precisely do I mean? While globalization and technological developments have given us more and more control over the external world, they have given us little grasp of the inner world of the human person and the ultimate questions of human existence. We have witnessed incredible advances in technological, economic, political and social developments but these have not been met by corresponding spiritual developments. Beneath the changes on the ocean surface are enduring human questions that globalization has largely ignored and left unexplored. These questions deal with loneliness and belonging, good and evil, peace and division, healing and suffering, meaning and meaninglessness, hope and despair, love and apathy, justice and injustice, freedom and slavery, and ultimately, life and death. These are the areas where people are being shipwrecked. And these issues can only be worked out in the inner depths of the human heart, where we forge the metal of what we most value. These values are the concern of spirituality.
There are many ways in which people define spirituality, but here I would like to offer a simple definition that spirituality in general deals with what people most value, and Christian spirituality involves living out what Jesus most valued. In other words Christian spirituality is about the following Jesus, living out the values of the kingdom of God, and generating a community transformed by the love of God and others. The goal of Christian spirituality is to foster justice, which is about making right our relationships with God, ourselves, others and the environment.
While the details of what we are to do as religious in an age of globalization is not entirely clear to any of us, I want to highlight here are three areas of how we might strengthen our spirituality as we seek to be faithful to God and the Kingdom he proclaimed. These three areas are: 1) A spirituality of grounded on the incarnation, 2) A spirituality of the Cross, and 3) A spirituality of the Eucharist. These three areas are critical to a spirituality of justice and generating a spirit of life, hope and solidarity.
A Spirituality of the Incarnation.
Our lives as religious is based first and foremost on the following of Jesus Christ, who we proclaim as the light of the world, the Prince of Peace, and the savior of the world. In the incarnation we acknowledge that, through no initiative of our own, God became human. This gratuitous act of love leaves much to ponder, but here I want to see the incarnation as a pattern for our own spiritual lives which calls us to become more human. As obvious as this point may seem, it is one of the central tasks of becoming a religious. Though some in are ranks are know as God’s “frozen chosen,” our spirituality should make us more human, not less, more and more into the image of God and Christ, not more and more into an image we have of ourselves or even an image of what that self should be as a religious.
What does it mean to be human today? It is not my intention here to get into Aristotle or Thomas or Kierkegaard and their take on the human, as valuable as they may be. But it is more to suggest that being human has to do with being authentic, genuine, and honest with our existence, with our struggles and fears, with our needs and desires, with our successes and failures, with our sexuality and our need for connection, with our hopes and desires. More than anything people are hungry to meet others of depth and substance in an age that is becoming increasingly superficial. I do not know how we can develop that depth without sincere prayer and reflection, since we cannot know what it means to be fully human independently of our relationship with God.
The main problem is that the global culture, profoundly marked as it is by consumerism, has its own ways of defining what it means to be human. If the Cartesian motto was “I think therefore I am,” the global one is more and more, “I consume therefore I am.” At the risk of trotting on old ground here, consumerism holds out the illusion that one more possession will finally satisfy us, that our humanity in all of its painful longing can at last find a resting place when it gets one more thing, but we ourselves know from experience that even after we have acquired something—perhaps something we long wanted—we realize there is always something more we want. There is something of our spirituality at work here.
When we get a new computer, there is always a better one that comes out the following week. If we get a new car, it quickly loses it intrigue with after we drive it a few times. We can fill in the blanks. But the problem is not materialism. The incarnation is a radical affirmation of a God who has taken on our material nature. The problem is a misplaced spirituality, which is a constant problem for human beings through the centuries. We are asking the things of creation to be God for us in a way they never can. When we worship creation and ignore the Creator we become less as creatures, in other words, we become less human. A spirituality based on the incarnation means understanding that we are made by love, that we are made for love, that we are made to love. God’s coming in the flesh in Jesus Christ names the realization of this love possible in our lives.
Our role as religious is to make manifest that which is most human: that love defines who we are as human beings. This means that our lives must always give expression to something more than even the good things this world offers. Who else is speaking this message today? We do not hear it in politics. We do not hear it from the media. We do not hear it from businesses. And, this is surprising, we often do not hear it in our schools either. I am always surprised by education even at Catholic Universities. We put a lot of stress on academic excellence, publishing standards, intellectual rigor, diversity of curriculum, and mastering a vast array of subjects and disciplines. All of these have value in their own right, and certainly our global culture in positive ways pushes those of us working in these settings to a level of professionalism that can liberate us and make us better ministers of the gospel. But what shocks me about our educational system is that we spend so little time with the subject of self-knowledge and teaching our students to learn about themselves, to grow in self-understanding. More to the point, we spend so little time helping them understand what is going in inside their hearts. Their inner lives are like foreign lands, and not knowing how to navigate that territory, they follow the maps given them by a consumer culture, which doesn’t lead them to anywhere of depth.
As our global culture evolves, people have less and less time to be alone, to be quiet, yet alone to contemplate. Very often—and I even include myself in this—we have an I-pod plugged into our ears so often that we cannot learn the more subtle, aesthetic aspects of our lives and the promptings of our hearts. To quote an adage by St. Ignatius, I feel like my computer, which is always with me, has become “my memory, my understanding, and my entire will.” I struggle with the challenge between contemplation and globalization even though I have had years to do self-reflection in my formation as a religious. Our young people have not had that formation. Some young adults today are so wired and connected to machines that they cannot speak to you unless somehow you are mediating a conversation through some kind of electronic gadget. What is at stake here is precisely our humanity, part of which we cannot understand without contemplation and especially contemplating who we are before the gratuity of a loving God. In an age of globalization, human development—especially as it is measured with respect to the quality of our relationships--has not advanced alongside technological development. Part of our role is to call into question the fascinations with the gadgets and toys of the world and rename the truth that our lives are made for God and God alone. At its core, to be human means to know what it means to love and be loved, to know and be known, and to be free from that which binds us so that we can be free to love others.
To be people of depth and authenticity means becoming—and this is the most difficult—vulnerable. I am not talking about a bleeding-heart vulnerability that has no sense of appropriate boundaries in relationships but one that knows how to share honestly and openly and authentically about the struggle to be human. As religious we have many ways of masking our existential vulnerability; globalization only intensifies our feelings of vulnerability. Yet we are afraid of our own vulnerability, and without dealing with it we cannot form meaningful relationships, not with each other, not with the poor, not even with God, who became vulnerable in Bethlehem, in ministry, and on the Cross.
For some young people the answer to the insecurity and vulnerability that we experience in a new global reality is to reactive-neo-conservatism. I heartily believe in being a witness to the world, in standing against a culture when necessary, and in being prophets and heralds of a new creation. I do not believe the way of doing this is simply by taking on the dress of previous generations as if the new evangelization of the world were about re-establishing a sense of lost-Christendom, complete with cassock and the full medieval religious regalia. John Chrysostom, was more direct when he said, in the early days of the Church the priests used chalices of wood and had hearts of gold. In his own day and age, he lamented that they use chalices of gold and have hearts of wood. The glory of God is revealed in those religious whose hearts have been divinized. If the substance of our religious witness is limited to external dimensions, I believe we will only look anachronistic and have little to say to the world. Psychologists are well acquainted with the term, “pre-mature, identity foreclosure,” where people—among them many religious—seek refuge in a pre-packaged identity without having gone through the difficult struggle of understanding what it means to be human.
Our vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience in the end should give expression to this human vulnerability and our trust in God in the midst of it. They are a way of calling into question the global fascination with money, sex and power in such a way that it points to a different and more liberating way of living, moving, and being in the world. I think if we are faithful to this task of being human, especially as it takes shape through our relationships, then we will be able to build bridges of every kind. By being in touch with our own humanity, I believe we will also be about to reach out to those whose humanity is most threatened.
A Spirituality of the Cross.
In a world that stresses more and more the importance of upward mobility, I believe a religious life founded on a spirituality of the Cross is central to human liberation. Paul’s letter to the Philippians speaks eloquently of the downward mobility of God and how Christ emptied himself of everything but love so that he could understand every level of human existence. It is from this lowest point of human existence and this darkest moment of human history that Christ opened up the possibility of hope and new life. In my own Congregation we have the motto of “Spes Unica,” the Cross is our only hope. There is great meaning and mystery in this aspect of our spirituality, and I believe that the role of religious is to witness to hope from amidst some of the most hopeless of circumstances, and to speak about God from some of the most godless of places. Our life and ministries always are measured not by the standards of our global economy but by the economy of the cross.
And what does it mean to be crucified? It means above all a life of radical self-giving in service to others. Such giving is especially difficult in the midst of ingratitude, misunderstanding, rejection and downright evil, but our witness to the gospel gives expression to the truth that love is stronger than any other power in the world. St. Francis was once quoted as saying that there is nothing so powerful as gentleness, and nothing so gentle as real strength. Such love is capable of changing even the world of the human heart, and it also opens up hope for those who are poor. To be crucified today means standing with those who live on the shadow side of global prosperity, the bottom billion and more, or those who Ignacio Ellacuria referred to as the “people crucified in history.”
Jesus death on the cross flowed from his love of the Father and his commitment to the kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God as Vatican II describes it is a kingdom of truth and life, of holiness and grace, of justice, love and peace. As we know, this kingdom was at the center of the ministry of Jesus Christ and without this being the center of our own ministries, we will have nothing to offer the world. Our ministries will be worth nothing in the end if we ourselves are not willing to invest all of our lives in this kingdom, even and especially as it brings us to the cross.
One of the most important manifestations of the Kingdom of God in our age is human solidarity. I believe that one of the ways we can manifest Christ as the light of the world and affirm our interconnectedness as a body of Christ. In a time when there are greater and greater divides between the rich and poor than ever before, one of our central missionary tasks is to bring out the Imago Dei, especially among those whose human dignity is degraded by poverty and global forces which have deemed them disposable and replaceable, especially those whose poverty and marginalization is intensified because of race, gender, religion or social situation. The area I know best is that among migrants, and it continues to perplex me that, while we are becoming more of an integrated world than ever before, with the movement of goods and services across borders in ways unimaginable, when it comes to the movement of people—especially the poor—it is a different story. Even while there is a lowering of trade barriers across the globe, today we are building higher walls than ever when it comes to labor. John Paul II’s words are particularly fitting here, because he said globalization yes, but it must always move us towards a “globalization of solidarity.”
A Spirituality of the Eucharist.
Thirdly, the call to become human through a spirituality of Incarnation, and the call to human solidarity through a spirituality of the Cross finds its deepest inspiration in my last point, which is the centrality of a spirituality of the Eucharist. The Eucharist stands as the focal point of our lives for a world, despite its advances, crying out for a genuine freedom and love that flows from human transformation. Gustavo Gutierrez has noted repeatedly that in the end, what matters is not liberation theology but the liberation of people, and in the final analysis liberation theology is about the Eucharist. I think the same could be said about our religious life.
The Eucharist is critical to understanding the call of religious as a call to holiness. Holiness includes piety, but it is not limited by it because it must be built on a solid sense of what it means to be human, not just escape into a religious image of one’s self. Holiness means referring all things to God and challenging a world bent on worshipping idols which enslave. A life of holiness has been and always will be about one thing: allowing our lives to be so taken up by the life of Jesus Christ and his Kingdom that He becomes our one desire. The role of religious life today is about living this truth and giving expression to it with the totality of our lives.
Without a sincere desire and commitment to be conformed to Jesus Christ, we only make God into our own disordered image and likeness instead of being conformed to his image and likeness. Religious life without a sincere desire for holiness may enable us to become well trained professionals with a religious veneer but we will be people who will have lost their salt and offer little of leaven for the world. Holiness is central to our witness in the world, which is a way of expressing a life fully alive and connected to God. Holiness is defined, first of all by a radical generosity, which is a language people understand in all cultures. Unfortunately, as I am sure we have seen in many of our congregations, this holiness has been inadequately understood, even by younger members with good intentions.
With the rise of secularism and the advent of post-modernity, there has been a great uprooting of many religious traditions. Many of the rituals and symbols which anchored people lives in previous generations have been replaced by rituals of a secular or a consumer culture. Not all these are problematic, but not all of them lead to liberation either. The deeper questions are whether these rituals liberate or enslave, whether they generate magnanimity of heart or simply isolate ourselves in self-interest. Young people know this, they know there is something empty about the global culture and its empty promises of consumerism, and they are searching for a place to root their lives, to take a stand in the world, and to find meaning in it. The Eucharist gives us a way of taking all that our lives are about and allowing them to be transformed by the power of God’s spirit into something new. It celebrates not only the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ but also those who receive it. No ritual of our lives is more important than becoming what we receive in the Eucharist and being sent out to bread for the world.
While much of the attention about globalization has become so focused only on the social, economic, and political costs of it, our job as religious is to highlight the human and spiritual costs of this time of global change. I believe it is here we have our greatest challenges and indeed can make our greatest contributions. Precisely by a commitment to become more human and more holy, which manifests itself through a greater communion with God and others in acts of human solidarity, we will then be light to the nations, salt of the earth, and instruments of peace. As economists emphasize the invisible hand and the need to keep the market free and unfettered, and as scientists in many diverse ways talk about the invisible mind and the need to seek truth through empirical data, our challenge is to always and everywhere and in everything—especially in our commitment to the poor—to speak through word and deed of the invisible heart. In the most godless of places that globalization has left behind, through a life founded on humanness, holiness and hope, we are called no less than to make visible the invisible heart of God.
To give expression to one community who has taken up this challenge, I would like to share with you a few clips of a video we just produced called, “One Border, One Body: Immigration and the Eucharist.” It is the story of how all of this comes together through one community at the border, and how building bridges sometimes means overcoming walls that human beings create. With one half in Mexico, the other half in the United States, and the Altar joining them together with the border-wall in the middle, it is one way in which religious and Christians can find ways of professing one faith, one hope, one baptism, one Lord, one Cross and one salvation, amidst a political and global reality that sets up walls and divisions. It is one place where I believe that a religious is proclaiming in word and deed that God is with us, that we can trust God, that Jesus Christ is the light of the world, or, to put it briefly, that the kingdom of God is at hand and we manifest it by the way we live our lives.
__________________________
Three Questions:
(1) The original text, to which I have made slight modification, is from Theodore O. Wedel, “Evangelism: The Mission of the Church to Those Outside Her Life,” Ecumenical Review 6, no. 1 (1953): 24.
(2) Less than 50 million of the world’s richest people have more income than 2.7 billion of the world’s poorest people. See Branko Milanovic, “True World Income Distribution, 1988 to 1993: First Calculation Based on Household Surveys Alone,” Economic Journal 112.476 (January 2002) 51–92,esp. 88–89.
(3) UNDP, Human Development Report 1999 (New York: Oxford University, 1999) 38. For more comprehensive information, see Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy: 1820-1992 (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1995); and Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001).
(4) See World Bank, World Development Report 2006; Milanovic, Worlds Apart; and Glen Firebaugh, The New Geography of Global Income Inequality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 2006).
(5) See Forbes Magazine, “The World’s Billionaires,” at http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/10/billionaires08_The-Worlds- Billionaires_Rank.html (accessed March 18, 2008).
(6) Two ways of assessing an individual’s economic status are by income and wealth. Annual income is the amount of money earned or received by the individual over the course of a year. Wealth is the amount of assets accumulated at any point over the lifetime of the individual less his or her total debt. Wealth includes anything that has material value such as real property, livestock, and retirement savings. I am grateful to economists Branko Milanovic and Rich Brown as well as to Mary J. Miller and Jesse Carrillo for their help in constructing this chart. The income calculations are done in so-called international dollars or PPP (purchasing power parity) dollars. The individual wealth calculations are drawn from the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) in Helsinki, as published in “Winner Takes (Almost) All,” Economist 381 (December 92006): 81.
(7) UNDP, Human Development Report 1999 (New York: Oxford University, 1999) 37.
(8) For more on these statistics, see the Institute for Policy Studies at: http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/top200.htm.
(9) See See Klinger, Hartman, Anderson, Cavanagh, and Sklar, Executive Excess 2002: CEOs Cook the Books, Skewer the Rest of Us 2002), 1.
(10) For example, Bruce Rohde, former chairman and CEO of ConAgra Foods who retired in September 2005, received more than $45 million during his leadership and retired with a package worth over $20 million, even though during his watch share prices fell by 28% and the company cut of 9,000 jobs. Hank McKinnell, CEO of Pfizer, was given over $79 million for five years of work, even though under his leadership stocks decreased in value by 40%. The company also guaranteed him a life-pension valued at $6 million a year. 11 CEOs for companies like Lucent Technologies, Home Depot, Hewlett-Packard, Wal-Mart, and others received a total of $865 million in 2004 and 2005 even though their shares collectively fell in value by $640 billion. Lee Raymond, who retired in December 2005 as CEO of oil giant Exxon, received $686 million in compensation from 1993 to 2005, even as oil prices increased. See Jill Rauh, CEOs Awarded Millions as Companies Downsize, June 10, 2006, available at the Education for Justice website at Center of Concern website, www.coc.org (subscription required). See also Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Chris Hartman, and Scott Klinger, Executive Excess 2003: CEOs Win, Workers and Taxpayers Lose (Boston: Institute for Policy Studies, 2003), 1.
(11) For more on the origins of this reflection, see A Paradox Of Our Times, http://onespiritproject.com/paradox.shtml:8/18/2006.
Some of the members of the life-saving station were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea. They replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building. Now the life-saving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it beautifully and furnished it exquisitely because they used it as a sort of club. Fewer members were now interested in going to sea on life-saving missions, so they hired life-boat crews to do this work. The life-saving motif still prevailed in this club's decorations and there was a special room where the club initiations were held. About this time, a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet, and half-drowned people, some of whom looked like we did the day we arrived. They were dirty and sick and some of them had black skin and some had yellow skin. The beautiful new club was in chaos. So the property committee immediately had a shower built outside the club where victims of shipwreck could be cleaned up before coming inside.
At the next meeting, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club's life-saving activities as being unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club. Some members insisted upon life-saving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a life-saving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save the lives of all the various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own life-saving station down the coast. They did.
As the years went by, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. It evolved into a club, and yet another life-saving station was founded. History continued to repeat itself, and if you visit that sea coast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along that shore. Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the people drown! (1)
In many ways the central message of my talk is very simple: our mission today is the same as it has always been: To proclaim Jesus Christ as the revelation of the God of Life and to labor with him to build a civilization of love. We do this precisely by reaching out to any and all people who are shipwrecked because of war, oppression, poverty, greed, abuse, drugs, fear, racism, meaninglessness, materialism, and many other perennial problems. We live out this mission not only as social workers, but who consciously and deliberately seek to follow Jesus Christ through the power of the Spirit. Amdist the many changes in our world and religious life, I would like to reflect on the ways in which the deeper current of our lives—namely our spirituality—calls and empowers us to become human, holy and hope-filled messengers of a new creation. I will structure my remarks around three levels: 1) Reflections on Personal Experience. 2) Reflections on the process of Globalization, 3) Reflections on Religious Life in a Global Age.
From Corporate Culture to Religious Life: Reflections on Personal Experience
For the last number of years I have been asking what theology adds to the process of Globalization. I ask this question more specifically as a religious of the Congregation of Holy Cross and a Catholic priest. I thought about sharing some of the theological insights of what later became the book, “Globalization, Spirituality and Justice: Navigating the Path to Peace,” and I invite you to take a look it if you want to explore more about the connection between our contemporary experience and the Christian tradition. But the more I reflected on this specific meeting, the more I thought it might be more valuable to talk about what led me to religious life in the first place and why I considered that a life as a religious would provide a better alternative to a career in a multinational corporation, which we know is one of the central, animating forces of globalization.
I am now 43 years old, and I was born during the Second Vatican Council in 1964. Given my age I know many of you are more qualified and more experienced than I am to give this talk, but I offer these reflections in hopes they will stimulate your own. In the course of growing up, I did not go to Catholic school until I went to college, so most of what I knew about my faith came about through my family and the Church we attended. Because of the nature of my father’s work, we moved on average of every two or three years, which made it very difficult to identify where I actually came from. About the only thing that was constant in my life since then is change.
The Church I grew up in did not seem to offer more in the way of stability. The local parishes, seeking to implement the norms of Vatican II, changed things regularly. I never knew the pre-Vatican II Church; I only knew the Church that was going though changes. In the beginning we had altar rails but within a few years we were suddenly receiving communion in the hands. We started off talking about the Sacrament of Penance and speaking to a priest behind a dark wall and then began referring to the Sacrament of reconciliation and began sharing face to face. I began going to mass out of a sense of obligation but then contemporary retreat movements began to introduce me to a more personal relationship with Jesus. When I got to college we started talking about how a personal relationship with Jesus also had social consequences, so we began working in issues of social justice and outreach to the poor. This time of change marked much of my own personal development, but it was also something that I think the universal Church was undergoing at the same time.
While I was born Catholic I only had passing thoughts about the priesthood, they quickly faded the more I fell in love, dated and imagined myself on a track to marriage, family, and a career in business. At the time I did not have any formulation of a global economy, but I knew I wanted to become involved in an international career. Much of this flowed from my experience an exchange foreign student in Uruguay and Argentina, and later in Chile, Peru and Mexico, which opened up new cultures and new worlds to me. These multi-cultural experiences enabled me to become more aware of the common bonds we shared beyond any of the particular differences among us.
Before returning to Latin America, however, and following in a family tradition, I began working for American Telephone and Telegraph and later the Bell System. AT&T at the time was one of the foremost, multinational corporations, and it provided me and my family with a relatively comfortable livelihood. My own social location at the time gave me the impression that success flowed from having money, power, and possessions, and the business world seemed to provide the best opportunities to seek these out. What is striking to me as I look back at this time is how uncritically I appropriated the values of a business and consumerist culture, without having tested out their adequacy in my own life. This soul-searching came later.
In my first job with AT&T I began working in a division called, “Advanced, Mobile Phone Service.” For the most part the company was still “on paper” in that it proposed a new technology that provided cellular phone service. I began emptying garbage cans and sweeping floors as a high school student, and then through college worked my way up through engineering, marketing and public relations. These jobs brought me to New Jersey, New York and later Washington, DC, where the company had its first test market, and I was in charge of the company’s first database. By 1984 we were not quite sure that cellular was going to succeed, and I tried to increase our customer sales beyond the roughly 250 customers in our database.
This company later became Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems, then, after a serious of other mergers, became Verizon Wireless. Now it is one of the largest cellular companies in the United States with more than 60 million subscribers. As this technology grew and expanded, they were offering lucrative opportunities to anyone with background and experience, not only nationally but internationally. Tremendous investment was happening in cellular, and opportunities were opening everywhere. Even while still in college the company I was working for gave me my own apartment, my own car, a car phone (which was a big deal in those days), an expense account, fancy dinners, flights home every weekend, a limousine to take me there, and more money than I had ever made in my life. According to what the world expected of me, or so it seemed at the time, I was finally beginning to “make it.” So why then, as I began to ride the beginning of a wave of global prosperity (at least in that part of the United States where I lived), did I start thinking of religious life and the priesthood?
Religious life, in all its strengths and weakness, has always held out the vision and the hope of being more and not just having more. It has given me a way to understand that material development without a corresponding spiritual development leaves a person empty and unsatisfied. I sometimes look back at that time and wonder what it would have been like if I stayed in Cellular. But to be honest, not often. I don’t miss that world at all. The job I had couldn’t even begin to satisfy the deeper hungers within. What attracted me to religious life was a desire to grow spiritually, to be part of a global community, and to give myself to a mission with meaning. The more I grew in my spirituality, the more it led me to go out to work with orphans, homeless, immigrants and others who are marginalized. Working with these people has been much more of an adventure than anything I experienced in the business world because it taught me that real wealth is measured not in terms of profits and losses but in terms of people’s inner wealth, what they possess inside themselves, namely, the quality of people’s characters, the endowment of their souls, the quality of their relationships and the treasures within them.
Religious life gave me the opportunity to explore the terrain of the heart in a way that the global economy could not even begin to touch. Let me frame it this way: religious life for me is a matter of seeking after God’s heart, learning about my own heart, and giving it away in service to other people and addressing the deepest needs of their hearts. This is what it means to be a consecrated religious: to belong to the heart of God and to be integrated into the heart of Christ the way Christ is integrated into the Father. This kind of integration cannot help but be concerned with the levels of disintegration in society, one that brings to the forefront a mission of the Kingdom of God.
The global economy never gave me or taught me that there is a wealth beyond material prosperity. I am not sure where I learned it. But without religious priests, brothers, and sisters who help nurture, guide and sustain my vocation, I never would have discovered it. And I do not believe my story is unique. I am sure if we looked back and were able to talk to the people who helped us discover our vocations, we would learn that they too experienced a call within, which nurtured by others and later came grow and mature within the charism of a particular community.
I am in religious life now twenty-two years and I am ordained fifteen of them. I have never looked back at leaving that communication in business for this one in religious life. Yet as I continue to reflect more on the contribution of theology, spirituality and religious life to the modern world, I find myself reflecting not only on the personal aspects of spirituality but their social dimensions as well. One image, with multiple dimensions, continues to shape my reflection [PPT 1]: 1) that we are all on a common global ship, 2) that it is time of Titanic change, 3) that we are veering way off course as a human community 4) that we are at a critical point in history, and 5) that when we can either shipwreck on the icebergs of greed or find a promised land of human solidarity. I believe it is within this arena that our spirituality and our mission takes shape, and I would like to reflect more for a moment on this process of globalization before discussing some element about religious life in the modern world.
From Isolation to Integration: Reflections on Globalization
Much has already been said about different aspects of globalization, and it is not my point to repeat them in detail [PPT 2]. But by way of summary, I would like to revisit some of this data as a way of clarifying our sense of what it means to journey together on this common global ship. One of the things globalization has made us increasingly aware of is that we are part of an inter- connected world, that we are linked together like never before. We are understanding this not only in terms of commercial markets, but we are also coming to understand this interconnection ecologically, anthropologically, even spiritually. The paradox of our contemporary reality however--if not contradiction--is that, while globalization is about becoming an integrated reality as never before, we are divided in ways never before seen in the history of humanity.
Robert Schreiter, who is the first and foremost theologian to take up this topic of globalization from a theological perspective, is one the editors of a special edition of Theological Studies on globalization, which just came out this week. In this issue I have one of the articles details some of the socio-economic data of our current global reality. Some of the most striking data I found in my research was that, although it is true that globalization has increased the standard of living for more than half the world, the gaps between the rich and the poor are growing, not shrinking.
The richest one percent of the world has as much as the poorest 57 percent taken together.(2) The difference in income between the richest and poorest countries was 3 to 1 in 1820, 11 to 1 in 1913, 35 to 1 in 1950, 44 to 1 in 1973, and 72 to 1 in 1992.(3) Current research indicates that the economic trends continue to diverge.(4) In 2008 more than 1000 people were billionaires, while a billion people survived on less than a dollar a day.(5) The figure below offers an economic snap-shot of the world: (6)
It is staggering to consider that, of the world’s 6.5 billion inhabitants, the three richest individuals have more assets than the combined GNP of the poorest 48 nations, a quarter of the world’s countries.(7) Also, of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 51 are corporations, 49 are countries. (8)
What has changed since I left corporate America is how dramatically the disparities have accelerated. The salaries of Chief Executive Officers is now as much as 411 times higher than that of the average worker, nearly ten times the 42-to-1 CEO-to-worker ratio in 1982.(9) By 2006, the CEOs of major corporations made annually, on average, $11.3 million. As these same corporations face financial pressures because of competition in the global economy, some CEOs and their corporate boards give themselves inordinate salaries and bonuses, some even after poor performance, laying off workers, and eliminating pension plans for many workers.(10)
The point here is not only to illustrate the extent we have lost our way, even in so short a period of time, but to highlight this disorder not only as a political, economic and social problem but a spiritual one. As Gaudium et Spes noted:
The truth is that the imbalances under which the modern world labors are linked with that more basic imbalance which is rooted in the heart of man... [where] many elements wrestle with one another. Thus, on the one hand, as a creature he experiences his limitations in a multitude of ways; on the other he feels himself to be boundless in his desires and summoned to a higher life. Pulled by manifold attractions he is constantly forced to choose among them and renounce some. Indeed, as a weak and sinful being, he often does what he would not, and fails to do what he would. Hence he suffers from internal divisions, and from these flow so many and such great discords in society (GS 10).
The issue, at root, is not that we have lost a sense of religion and become a secular society. We have simply just replaced One God for other gods and have moved principally from a monotheistic faith to a money-theistic faith. This new system has not helped us find a promised land of human solidarity but instead has really steered us off course and put us in grave danger of being ship wrecked, along with those we seek to help. In addition to the economic disparities, we know that we stand on the edge of running aground ecologically if we do not make a course correction. So what role to religious play in this process? We are certainly not the only group trying to deal with metanoia, but our role is critical.
My argument is that there are different levels of understanding globalization, and our current socio-economic setting is only dealing with one level of it, and I believe Religious life is significant in dealing with the others. I can illustrate best by a contemporary analogy, and it will allow me to extend the ship imagery even further [PPT 3]. If we look at the challenge of navigation in our contemporary context, we recognize that we have three different systems which can help us. Sonar helps map out the ocean depths, radar helps us identify obstacles on the ocean surface, and global positioning systems help us understand our location through satellite technology.
Like sonar, theology in general and religious life in particular offers us insight to the world beneath the ocean surface by probing the deeper terrain of human nature in all its capacities for virtue and sin. Like radar, they offers us a picture of the world in front of us by examining how we interact with others and our environment. Like a global positioning system, they offer us insight into transcendent realities by helping interpret the signals from above which can help us find our way from within our own social locations.
I believe the density of the conversation around globalization has to do with the horizontal dimensions of globalization, but religious life can help the world deal with its more vertical dimensions. While most of the world preoccupies itself with radar, part of our task is to help the world understand GPS and sonar as important instruments in that can help us as we seek to navigate our way through the complex realities of this time of change. Such a mission can be particularly helpful in a world trying to come to terms with the paradoxes of globalization. You may be familiar with a reflection called, “A Paradox of our times,” which is a interesting reflection on life in the modern world and which I quote in part:
The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways but narrower viewpoints. We spend more but have less. We buy more but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge but less judgment, more experts yet more problems, more medicine but less wellness….
We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've done larger things but not better things. We've cleaned up the air but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom but not our prejudice. We write more but learn less. We plan more but accomplish less. We've learned to rush but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less…It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom….(11)
Our lives as religious gives witness to the gospel message, which, as we know, offers another paradox, which is built on premises that differs substantially from our global economy: that we find ourselves by losing them, the greatest among us is the one who serves, that the one who was crucified has risen from the dead. Put another way, as we travel on this global ship, even as much changes on ocean surface, our job is to continue to understand human nature and divine revelation in order to offer witness to some of the enduring constants of what it means to be human before God. Even though we may have some differing interpretations of this task from culture to culture, there is at root more that we share in common than makes us different.
Reflection on Religious in an Age of Globalization
What then is the role of religious life in an age of globalization? As daunting as these changes may be, and as widespread, complex and revolutionary as these changes have been, in many ways the witness of religious life today is the same as it has been for previous generations. Though it is met with new challenges, the call is the same as it was for the industrial revolution, the enlightenment, the Renaissance, the middle Ages and the early days of the Church: It is to desire one thing: Jesus Christ and the Kingdom he proclaimed. Taking on the mind and heart of Christ is the one constant that will not change in our calling, even as everything else does. By saying this I do not mean to suggest that our job is simply to offer simple, pre-packaged, theological answers to a period marked by new “wineskins.” Globalization demands of us new competencies that are able to face new complexities, but at the core, our mission is still the same: to reach out to those who are shipwrecked in any way by war, poverty, division, addiction, fear, anxiety and many other social ills, to proclaim a God of Life and to build a civilization of love.
As we deal with these challenges I believe it is our task as religious to articulate some of the deeper currents of human life beyond this period of change and to examine them light of the gospel message. What precisely do I mean? While globalization and technological developments have given us more and more control over the external world, they have given us little grasp of the inner world of the human person and the ultimate questions of human existence. We have witnessed incredible advances in technological, economic, political and social developments but these have not been met by corresponding spiritual developments. Beneath the changes on the ocean surface are enduring human questions that globalization has largely ignored and left unexplored. These questions deal with loneliness and belonging, good and evil, peace and division, healing and suffering, meaning and meaninglessness, hope and despair, love and apathy, justice and injustice, freedom and slavery, and ultimately, life and death. These are the areas where people are being shipwrecked. And these issues can only be worked out in the inner depths of the human heart, where we forge the metal of what we most value. These values are the concern of spirituality.
There are many ways in which people define spirituality, but here I would like to offer a simple definition that spirituality in general deals with what people most value, and Christian spirituality involves living out what Jesus most valued. In other words Christian spirituality is about the following Jesus, living out the values of the kingdom of God, and generating a community transformed by the love of God and others. The goal of Christian spirituality is to foster justice, which is about making right our relationships with God, ourselves, others and the environment.
While the details of what we are to do as religious in an age of globalization is not entirely clear to any of us, I want to highlight here are three areas of how we might strengthen our spirituality as we seek to be faithful to God and the Kingdom he proclaimed. These three areas are: 1) A spirituality of grounded on the incarnation, 2) A spirituality of the Cross, and 3) A spirituality of the Eucharist. These three areas are critical to a spirituality of justice and generating a spirit of life, hope and solidarity.
A Spirituality of the Incarnation.
Our lives as religious is based first and foremost on the following of Jesus Christ, who we proclaim as the light of the world, the Prince of Peace, and the savior of the world. In the incarnation we acknowledge that, through no initiative of our own, God became human. This gratuitous act of love leaves much to ponder, but here I want to see the incarnation as a pattern for our own spiritual lives which calls us to become more human. As obvious as this point may seem, it is one of the central tasks of becoming a religious. Though some in are ranks are know as God’s “frozen chosen,” our spirituality should make us more human, not less, more and more into the image of God and Christ, not more and more into an image we have of ourselves or even an image of what that self should be as a religious.
What does it mean to be human today? It is not my intention here to get into Aristotle or Thomas or Kierkegaard and their take on the human, as valuable as they may be. But it is more to suggest that being human has to do with being authentic, genuine, and honest with our existence, with our struggles and fears, with our needs and desires, with our successes and failures, with our sexuality and our need for connection, with our hopes and desires. More than anything people are hungry to meet others of depth and substance in an age that is becoming increasingly superficial. I do not know how we can develop that depth without sincere prayer and reflection, since we cannot know what it means to be fully human independently of our relationship with God.
The main problem is that the global culture, profoundly marked as it is by consumerism, has its own ways of defining what it means to be human. If the Cartesian motto was “I think therefore I am,” the global one is more and more, “I consume therefore I am.” At the risk of trotting on old ground here, consumerism holds out the illusion that one more possession will finally satisfy us, that our humanity in all of its painful longing can at last find a resting place when it gets one more thing, but we ourselves know from experience that even after we have acquired something—perhaps something we long wanted—we realize there is always something more we want. There is something of our spirituality at work here.
When we get a new computer, there is always a better one that comes out the following week. If we get a new car, it quickly loses it intrigue with after we drive it a few times. We can fill in the blanks. But the problem is not materialism. The incarnation is a radical affirmation of a God who has taken on our material nature. The problem is a misplaced spirituality, which is a constant problem for human beings through the centuries. We are asking the things of creation to be God for us in a way they never can. When we worship creation and ignore the Creator we become less as creatures, in other words, we become less human. A spirituality based on the incarnation means understanding that we are made by love, that we are made for love, that we are made to love. God’s coming in the flesh in Jesus Christ names the realization of this love possible in our lives.
Our role as religious is to make manifest that which is most human: that love defines who we are as human beings. This means that our lives must always give expression to something more than even the good things this world offers. Who else is speaking this message today? We do not hear it in politics. We do not hear it from the media. We do not hear it from businesses. And, this is surprising, we often do not hear it in our schools either. I am always surprised by education even at Catholic Universities. We put a lot of stress on academic excellence, publishing standards, intellectual rigor, diversity of curriculum, and mastering a vast array of subjects and disciplines. All of these have value in their own right, and certainly our global culture in positive ways pushes those of us working in these settings to a level of professionalism that can liberate us and make us better ministers of the gospel. But what shocks me about our educational system is that we spend so little time with the subject of self-knowledge and teaching our students to learn about themselves, to grow in self-understanding. More to the point, we spend so little time helping them understand what is going in inside their hearts. Their inner lives are like foreign lands, and not knowing how to navigate that territory, they follow the maps given them by a consumer culture, which doesn’t lead them to anywhere of depth.
As our global culture evolves, people have less and less time to be alone, to be quiet, yet alone to contemplate. Very often—and I even include myself in this—we have an I-pod plugged into our ears so often that we cannot learn the more subtle, aesthetic aspects of our lives and the promptings of our hearts. To quote an adage by St. Ignatius, I feel like my computer, which is always with me, has become “my memory, my understanding, and my entire will.” I struggle with the challenge between contemplation and globalization even though I have had years to do self-reflection in my formation as a religious. Our young people have not had that formation. Some young adults today are so wired and connected to machines that they cannot speak to you unless somehow you are mediating a conversation through some kind of electronic gadget. What is at stake here is precisely our humanity, part of which we cannot understand without contemplation and especially contemplating who we are before the gratuity of a loving God. In an age of globalization, human development—especially as it is measured with respect to the quality of our relationships--has not advanced alongside technological development. Part of our role is to call into question the fascinations with the gadgets and toys of the world and rename the truth that our lives are made for God and God alone. At its core, to be human means to know what it means to love and be loved, to know and be known, and to be free from that which binds us so that we can be free to love others.
To be people of depth and authenticity means becoming—and this is the most difficult—vulnerable. I am not talking about a bleeding-heart vulnerability that has no sense of appropriate boundaries in relationships but one that knows how to share honestly and openly and authentically about the struggle to be human. As religious we have many ways of masking our existential vulnerability; globalization only intensifies our feelings of vulnerability. Yet we are afraid of our own vulnerability, and without dealing with it we cannot form meaningful relationships, not with each other, not with the poor, not even with God, who became vulnerable in Bethlehem, in ministry, and on the Cross.
For some young people the answer to the insecurity and vulnerability that we experience in a new global reality is to reactive-neo-conservatism. I heartily believe in being a witness to the world, in standing against a culture when necessary, and in being prophets and heralds of a new creation. I do not believe the way of doing this is simply by taking on the dress of previous generations as if the new evangelization of the world were about re-establishing a sense of lost-Christendom, complete with cassock and the full medieval religious regalia. John Chrysostom, was more direct when he said, in the early days of the Church the priests used chalices of wood and had hearts of gold. In his own day and age, he lamented that they use chalices of gold and have hearts of wood. The glory of God is revealed in those religious whose hearts have been divinized. If the substance of our religious witness is limited to external dimensions, I believe we will only look anachronistic and have little to say to the world. Psychologists are well acquainted with the term, “pre-mature, identity foreclosure,” where people—among them many religious—seek refuge in a pre-packaged identity without having gone through the difficult struggle of understanding what it means to be human.
Our vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience in the end should give expression to this human vulnerability and our trust in God in the midst of it. They are a way of calling into question the global fascination with money, sex and power in such a way that it points to a different and more liberating way of living, moving, and being in the world. I think if we are faithful to this task of being human, especially as it takes shape through our relationships, then we will be able to build bridges of every kind. By being in touch with our own humanity, I believe we will also be about to reach out to those whose humanity is most threatened.
A Spirituality of the Cross.
In a world that stresses more and more the importance of upward mobility, I believe a religious life founded on a spirituality of the Cross is central to human liberation. Paul’s letter to the Philippians speaks eloquently of the downward mobility of God and how Christ emptied himself of everything but love so that he could understand every level of human existence. It is from this lowest point of human existence and this darkest moment of human history that Christ opened up the possibility of hope and new life. In my own Congregation we have the motto of “Spes Unica,” the Cross is our only hope. There is great meaning and mystery in this aspect of our spirituality, and I believe that the role of religious is to witness to hope from amidst some of the most hopeless of circumstances, and to speak about God from some of the most godless of places. Our life and ministries always are measured not by the standards of our global economy but by the economy of the cross.
And what does it mean to be crucified? It means above all a life of radical self-giving in service to others. Such giving is especially difficult in the midst of ingratitude, misunderstanding, rejection and downright evil, but our witness to the gospel gives expression to the truth that love is stronger than any other power in the world. St. Francis was once quoted as saying that there is nothing so powerful as gentleness, and nothing so gentle as real strength. Such love is capable of changing even the world of the human heart, and it also opens up hope for those who are poor. To be crucified today means standing with those who live on the shadow side of global prosperity, the bottom billion and more, or those who Ignacio Ellacuria referred to as the “people crucified in history.”
Jesus death on the cross flowed from his love of the Father and his commitment to the kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God as Vatican II describes it is a kingdom of truth and life, of holiness and grace, of justice, love and peace. As we know, this kingdom was at the center of the ministry of Jesus Christ and without this being the center of our own ministries, we will have nothing to offer the world. Our ministries will be worth nothing in the end if we ourselves are not willing to invest all of our lives in this kingdom, even and especially as it brings us to the cross.
One of the most important manifestations of the Kingdom of God in our age is human solidarity. I believe that one of the ways we can manifest Christ as the light of the world and affirm our interconnectedness as a body of Christ. In a time when there are greater and greater divides between the rich and poor than ever before, one of our central missionary tasks is to bring out the Imago Dei, especially among those whose human dignity is degraded by poverty and global forces which have deemed them disposable and replaceable, especially those whose poverty and marginalization is intensified because of race, gender, religion or social situation. The area I know best is that among migrants, and it continues to perplex me that, while we are becoming more of an integrated world than ever before, with the movement of goods and services across borders in ways unimaginable, when it comes to the movement of people—especially the poor—it is a different story. Even while there is a lowering of trade barriers across the globe, today we are building higher walls than ever when it comes to labor. John Paul II’s words are particularly fitting here, because he said globalization yes, but it must always move us towards a “globalization of solidarity.”
A Spirituality of the Eucharist.
Thirdly, the call to become human through a spirituality of Incarnation, and the call to human solidarity through a spirituality of the Cross finds its deepest inspiration in my last point, which is the centrality of a spirituality of the Eucharist. The Eucharist stands as the focal point of our lives for a world, despite its advances, crying out for a genuine freedom and love that flows from human transformation. Gustavo Gutierrez has noted repeatedly that in the end, what matters is not liberation theology but the liberation of people, and in the final analysis liberation theology is about the Eucharist. I think the same could be said about our religious life.
The Eucharist is critical to understanding the call of religious as a call to holiness. Holiness includes piety, but it is not limited by it because it must be built on a solid sense of what it means to be human, not just escape into a religious image of one’s self. Holiness means referring all things to God and challenging a world bent on worshipping idols which enslave. A life of holiness has been and always will be about one thing: allowing our lives to be so taken up by the life of Jesus Christ and his Kingdom that He becomes our one desire. The role of religious life today is about living this truth and giving expression to it with the totality of our lives.
Without a sincere desire and commitment to be conformed to Jesus Christ, we only make God into our own disordered image and likeness instead of being conformed to his image and likeness. Religious life without a sincere desire for holiness may enable us to become well trained professionals with a religious veneer but we will be people who will have lost their salt and offer little of leaven for the world. Holiness is central to our witness in the world, which is a way of expressing a life fully alive and connected to God. Holiness is defined, first of all by a radical generosity, which is a language people understand in all cultures. Unfortunately, as I am sure we have seen in many of our congregations, this holiness has been inadequately understood, even by younger members with good intentions.
With the rise of secularism and the advent of post-modernity, there has been a great uprooting of many religious traditions. Many of the rituals and symbols which anchored people lives in previous generations have been replaced by rituals of a secular or a consumer culture. Not all these are problematic, but not all of them lead to liberation either. The deeper questions are whether these rituals liberate or enslave, whether they generate magnanimity of heart or simply isolate ourselves in self-interest. Young people know this, they know there is something empty about the global culture and its empty promises of consumerism, and they are searching for a place to root their lives, to take a stand in the world, and to find meaning in it. The Eucharist gives us a way of taking all that our lives are about and allowing them to be transformed by the power of God’s spirit into something new. It celebrates not only the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ but also those who receive it. No ritual of our lives is more important than becoming what we receive in the Eucharist and being sent out to bread for the world.
While much of the attention about globalization has become so focused only on the social, economic, and political costs of it, our job as religious is to highlight the human and spiritual costs of this time of global change. I believe it is here we have our greatest challenges and indeed can make our greatest contributions. Precisely by a commitment to become more human and more holy, which manifests itself through a greater communion with God and others in acts of human solidarity, we will then be light to the nations, salt of the earth, and instruments of peace. As economists emphasize the invisible hand and the need to keep the market free and unfettered, and as scientists in many diverse ways talk about the invisible mind and the need to seek truth through empirical data, our challenge is to always and everywhere and in everything—especially in our commitment to the poor—to speak through word and deed of the invisible heart. In the most godless of places that globalization has left behind, through a life founded on humanness, holiness and hope, we are called no less than to make visible the invisible heart of God.
To give expression to one community who has taken up this challenge, I would like to share with you a few clips of a video we just produced called, “One Border, One Body: Immigration and the Eucharist.” It is the story of how all of this comes together through one community at the border, and how building bridges sometimes means overcoming walls that human beings create. With one half in Mexico, the other half in the United States, and the Altar joining them together with the border-wall in the middle, it is one way in which religious and Christians can find ways of professing one faith, one hope, one baptism, one Lord, one Cross and one salvation, amidst a political and global reality that sets up walls and divisions. It is one place where I believe that a religious is proclaiming in word and deed that God is with us, that we can trust God, that Jesus Christ is the light of the world, or, to put it briefly, that the kingdom of God is at hand and we manifest it by the way we live our lives.
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Three Questions:
- 1)What does it mean to be human?
- 2)What does it mean to be holy?
- 3)What are ways through which we can
foster human solidarity?
(1) The original text, to which I have made slight modification, is from Theodore O. Wedel, “Evangelism: The Mission of the Church to Those Outside Her Life,” Ecumenical Review 6, no. 1 (1953): 24.
(2) Less than 50 million of the world’s richest people have more income than 2.7 billion of the world’s poorest people. See Branko Milanovic, “True World Income Distribution, 1988 to 1993: First Calculation Based on Household Surveys Alone,” Economic Journal 112.476 (January 2002) 51–92,esp. 88–89.
(3) UNDP, Human Development Report 1999 (New York: Oxford University, 1999) 38. For more comprehensive information, see Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy: 1820-1992 (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1995); and Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001).
(4) See World Bank, World Development Report 2006; Milanovic, Worlds Apart; and Glen Firebaugh, The New Geography of Global Income Inequality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 2006).
(5) See Forbes Magazine, “The World’s Billionaires,” at http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/10/billionaires08_The-Worlds- Billionaires_Rank.html (accessed March 18, 2008).
(6) Two ways of assessing an individual’s economic status are by income and wealth. Annual income is the amount of money earned or received by the individual over the course of a year. Wealth is the amount of assets accumulated at any point over the lifetime of the individual less his or her total debt. Wealth includes anything that has material value such as real property, livestock, and retirement savings. I am grateful to economists Branko Milanovic and Rich Brown as well as to Mary J. Miller and Jesse Carrillo for their help in constructing this chart. The income calculations are done in so-called international dollars or PPP (purchasing power parity) dollars. The individual wealth calculations are drawn from the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) in Helsinki, as published in “Winner Takes (Almost) All,” Economist 381 (December 92006): 81.
(7) UNDP, Human Development Report 1999 (New York: Oxford University, 1999) 37.
(8) For more on these statistics, see the Institute for Policy Studies at: http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/top200.htm.
(9) See See Klinger, Hartman, Anderson, Cavanagh, and Sklar, Executive Excess 2002: CEOs Cook the Books, Skewer the Rest of Us 2002), 1.
(10) For example, Bruce Rohde, former chairman and CEO of ConAgra Foods who retired in September 2005, received more than $45 million during his leadership and retired with a package worth over $20 million, even though during his watch share prices fell by 28% and the company cut of 9,000 jobs. Hank McKinnell, CEO of Pfizer, was given over $79 million for five years of work, even though under his leadership stocks decreased in value by 40%. The company also guaranteed him a life-pension valued at $6 million a year. 11 CEOs for companies like Lucent Technologies, Home Depot, Hewlett-Packard, Wal-Mart, and others received a total of $865 million in 2004 and 2005 even though their shares collectively fell in value by $640 billion. Lee Raymond, who retired in December 2005 as CEO of oil giant Exxon, received $686 million in compensation from 1993 to 2005, even as oil prices increased. See Jill Rauh, CEOs Awarded Millions as Companies Downsize, June 10, 2006, available at the Education for Justice website at Center of Concern website, www.coc.org (subscription required). See also Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Chris Hartman, and Scott Klinger, Executive Excess 2003: CEOs Win, Workers and Taxpayers Lose (Boston: Institute for Policy Studies, 2003), 1.
(11) For more on the origins of this reflection, see A Paradox Of Our Times, http://onespiritproject.com/paradox.shtml:8/18/2006.
